And static product reviews are getting a much-needed glowup.

This shift mirrors China’s mobile-first, immersive shopping model, where apps are designed to allow users to see and interact with rich media content to make informed buying decisions. India is now following this path, focusing on visual proof and real-time engagement to help users feel more confident in their choices.

The Need for Integrating Visual Proof

In India, buying decisions are heavily influenced by what users see and how they feel about what others are doing. Online shopping (currently at 7% of the consumption) while growing rapidly, is still something many users are learning to get comfortable with.

Risk-averse consumers often want to triple-check everything before making a purchase, whether it’s food or clothes. It's not just about reading a review or checking a product description anymore—users need to see the product in action as if they were physically present with it.

Unlike the static reviews common in European markets, Indian apps are embracing real-time engagement and social validation.

Whether through shoppable videos, influencer-driven content, or social recommendations, these apps provide the visual proof that builds confidence in purchase decisions, turning engagement into real conversions.

This shift is creating immersive, social, and trust-driven experiences that drive both user loyalty and revenue.

Apps like Myntra, and Ajio are great examples of integrating shoppable videos, Instagram-like stories, and influencer feeds.

Users can watch, interact, and see the product in motion before they hit “buy.”

This visual engagement boosts confidence and ensures users feel more connected to the brand and their purchase choices.

No more wondering, "I hope this looks as good in person."

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Food delivery apps like Swiggy are also embracing this format, letting users watch real, unfiltered videos of food arriving from restaurants.

Instead of just reading reviews or checking photos, users are seeing visual proof of freshness, quality, and presentation, which helps with trust and builds excitement around their food choices.

P.S. Swiggy’s “Group Order” and Zomato’s “Friends' Recommendations” features are pushing social engagement past just stories & feeds.

Enabling users to collaborate in real-time and share meal choices, these turn ordering into a socially driven, interactive experience- making the entire food delivery journey feel more integrated into users' lives.

Thanks for reading! One Step Ahead is a publication by Plotline to give you a BTS breakdown of the product & growth strategies that are propelling consumer apps today.

And while you’re here, remember, there are only 3 rules to life:

1. Be kind to everyone you meet

2. Don’t take yourself too seriously

3. Drink lots of water

See you in some time!

And now apps like Zepto and Zupee, by partnering with beloved franchises like Oreo and KBC, are showcasing that quizzes aren’t just progress tests or fun mediums for driving interactions but can generate real revenue for apps and foster lasting affinity for brands.

Take Oreo’s Pokémon-themed quiz on Zepto 🍪

This isn’t your average trivia challenge; it’s an intentional fusion of nostalgia and commerce, tied directly to purchases.

• Nostalgia Meets Commerce: Pokémon resonates strongly with millennials and Gen Z - Oreo’s prime audience.

• Sequential Format: A multi-level quiz keeps users coming back to “beat the game.”

• Purchase-Linked Rewards: Real conversions happen when users buy Oreo to access exclusive rewards.

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And then there’s the KBC contest on Zupee 🎥

It’s turning Friday nights into a digital event where millions get to live the excitement of being in the hot seat on one of India’s most iconic quiz shows.

• Cultural Icon: KBC has a massive following, and tying it to an in-app experience is an instant draw.

• Event-Like Format: A fixed time slot creates anticipation and encourages repeat participation.

• High-Stakes Reward: The potential to win ₹1 Lakh adds excitement and urgency.

The common thread? 🧵

These examples of Oreo on Zepto and KBC on Zupee are a seamless blend of user engagement and brand strategy.

A simple quiz format, powered by a beloved franchise is an “event” that creates deeper and profitable interaction, not another gamification tactic - where users collect a prize and move on.

By weaving in familiar cultural touchstones (Pokémon, Amitabh Bachchan), these apps tap into existing fanbases, transforming a simple quiz into a moment of genuine engagement, and, yes, potential revenue for brands.

And that event can be a game-changer for everyone involved - Brands get exposure to an engaged audience, users get a shot at winning something meaningful, and the app itself builds loyalty that can outlast any short-term promotion.

Thanks for reading! One Step Ahead is a publication by Plotline to give you a BTS breakdown of the product & growth strategies that are propelling consumer apps today.

And while you’re here, remember, there are only 3 rules to life:

1. Be kind to everyone you meet

2. Don’t take yourself too seriously

3. Drink lots of water

See you in some time!

It’s easy to add to the digital noise with more notifications, more emails and hope that something sticks. But what if the secret to stickiness was doing less?

Take Thursday, for example.

No, not the day of the week—this is the dating app that isn’t interested in bombarding users with notifications.

Instead, it hands you one dedicated window each day—your very own “golden hour” for dating. When that time slot opens, you’re not just aimlessly swiping 👈/👉; you’re stepping into a focused moment designed for genuine connections.

Missed your chance today? No worries—another week brings another opportunity but not without the FOMO from the previous week.

Now, let’s swing over to BeReal.

Once a day, at a random moment, this social app sends out a single push notification that gives you just 2 minutes to capture an unfiltered snapshot of your life.

Aimed squarely at an audience fed up 😤 with the perfectionist, algorithm-driven loops of platforms like Instagram and TikTok, BeReal intentionally sets the bar low—no fancy edits, no overthinking—just a quick, authentic share.

Their App Store description even cheekily warns potential users, “If you want to become an influencer, you can stay on TikTok and Instagram.”

That one daily nudge is designed to encourage users to act swiftly and share genuine moments without the pressure of perfection.

Thursday instils scarcity and BeReal instils urgency via how their product operates, keep the emotional bar low, make it easy for users to engage and, over time, form a habit users won’t want to break.

💡 Instead of relying on constant, passive engagements that create noise but rarely convert, think about how you can create intentional, high-impact moments.

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That’s it for this Spotlight. Thanks for joining us!

And while you’re here, remember, there are only 3 rules to life:

1. Be kind to everyone you meet

2. Don’t take yourself too seriously

3. Drink lots of water

See you back soon!

We’re back in 2023 with some cool growth experiments 🔬 for you to try. If you’ve run other experiments to great success (or failure, as long as you’re learning about your customers you’re doing experimentation well), let us know in the comments!

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Most companies have a “set-it-and-forget-it” 😩 pricing strategy. But pricing can be a significant lever to drive growth.

Here are some ways to experiment with your pricing page or plans to increase 📈purchases, signups, downloads, revenue, etc.

Social proof your pricing page with recent purchase or signup data 👨‍💻

Add recent buying or signup data on your pricing page. Check if signups/demo bookings/purchases increase after adding this social proof.

At every stage of the user journey, you’re trying to add motivation 👌 for the user to go on to the next step, which could be add to cart, signup, etc. By providing social proof on your pricing page, you’re adding motivation to counteract any friction caused by your pricing plan.

This tactic works well for e-commerce, D2C brands, mobile apps, or SaaS businesses with high volume signups.

Here's how Basecamp, a project management software does it.

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Use anchoring ⚓️ for your pricing plans

Show the most expensive subscription plan first (the anchor) so that other plans look inexpensive in comparison 😁.

Anchoring is the psychological bias to overemphasize the first piece of information (or price) presented to us. This strongly influences how we perceive additional information.

Perhaps the best example would be how Apple 🍎 showcases its prices, with the Pro version (the most expensive) being the first one you see on the left.

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Use the decoy effect 🏴‍☠️

When choosing between two alternatives, the addition of a third, less attractive option (the decoy) can influence our perception 🧠 of the first two choices.

Companies include "decoy" options to highlight the value of their target (usually highest margin) options. Generally, companies have little intent to actually sell the decoy.

A decoy looks similar but is slightly less appealing than the target.

Here’s how theatre popcorn 🍿 uses this effect. The large size is the target option with the highest margin. Without the medium option, you are making a decision based on how much you want to eat. Now add the medium-size decoy.

With only a 50 cent increase between the Medium and Large, the perceived value versus the price for the large is huge, making it hard to pass up.

The Economist used one of the most obvious decoys ever, and it still worked 🤔. Here is their pricing:

The Economist wanted to drive purchases of the highly profitable 3rd option, Print & Web subscription. But at $125, at over 2X the price of the base Web subscription, it wasn't lucrative 🤷‍♂️ to most customers. The company added the Print Only option as a decoy, at the same price as the Print & Web.

This decoy looks so obvious that it shouldn’t have worked. But it did. 🤯

Customers were no longer comparing the $59 Web only plan with the $125 Print and Web plan. Rather, they were now comparing the Print only plan at $125 against the Print and Web subscription plan at $125.

The magazine supposedly increased its sales by 43% 📈 after this pricing strategy.

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That’s it for this one! Thanks for joining us! And while you’re here, remember, there are only 3 rules to life:

1. Be kind to everyone you meet

2. Don’t take yourself too seriously

3. Drink lots of water

See you next week!

We released Part 1 to this a couple of months ago, and we’re now back with two more ways to validate demand for your product without actually building it.

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Build a viral tool that mirrors the intent of your product 🧑‍💻

Calm is a $2B meditation app. Their origins can be traced back to a simple website, which urged you to sit back and do nothing 🧘 for 2 minutes. This went viral on Twitter in early 2011.

But it doesn’t stop at making a website and driving traffic 🚗 in hopes of conversion. Here’s why it worked for Calm:

1. The website represents the crux of what would later become Calm. It encourages you to relax and be present - which is key to meditation and mindfulness

2. Only if you manage to sit through the 2 minutes without touching your mouse, keyboard, etc can you drop your email, filtering out low-intent traffic. Alex captured ~100k high-intent emails for Calm before building a product 🙌

3. A number of these emails on the website became early adopters for Calm. The closer the viral product is to your core product, the better your conversions.

Validating demand with a blog/newsletter 📕

The concept behind Product Hunt was simple: to build a community for product people to share, discover, and discuss new products.

But it would take quite a bit of effort 👷 to build the actual product. Ryan needed to validate that people actually wanted what he was building.

How could he bring his idea to market sooner to test his hypothesis?

Ryan logged into Linkydink (a tool to create a group and invite people to share links with other contributors and subscribers. Each day, the collection of posts is emailed to the group) and invited a few of his startup friends to contribute 🤝. He wrote a quick blog post and tweeted announcing this initial version of Product Hunt.

Within 20 minutes, he had an MVP 🤯. Here’s how it worked:

1. Contributors submit a link to their product discovery using Makeshift’s linkydink tool.

2. Once per day, the collection of products and links are emailed to subscribers with the attribution of who made the submission.

“I created this collaborative list called Product Hunt and invited maybe a couple dozen people I knew to join,” says Hoover. “They worked at startups, or were just people I knew. I didn’t market it heavily, but people seemed to like it right away. Soon, I had a couple hundred subscribers and people started coming up to me to talk about how much they enjoyed getting the email every day.”

In just two weeks, 170+ people 👩‍👦 subscribed to product discoveries from 30 hand-picked contributors, consisting of startup founders, VCs, and prominent bloggers.

This traction was encouraging, especially considering the minimalism of the “Linkydink MVP” and the lack of marketing.

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Thanks for joining us! And while you’re here, remember, there are only 3 rules to life:

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In his essay, Sachin Rekhi, founder and CEO at Notejoy, details the hierarchy of user friction. There are 2 layers above the base layer 🔺, which largely go unsolved.

Today, we’ll deep dive into what each type of friction is and look at specific examples from products that have significantly reduced these 3 types of friction.

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Interaction Friction

The friction experienced by a user when interacting with your product’s interface. This relates to UI aspects that hinder your users 🧗‍♀️ from accomplishing their goal. Imagine Google autocomplete whenever you make a search. Google reduces the work you have to do by predicting your search.

Other common examples include reducing steps in a form field to the bare minimum needed and having a prominent call-to-action 📞 so users are clear on the next step they should take.

The recent wave of buy-now-pay-later companies have significantly reduced interaction friction associated with payments by making checkout a 1-click process.

Cognitive Friction

Cognitive friction is directly proportional to the mental effort 🧠 being used to complete a task.

Consider the task of notetaking. Before apps like Evernote, Notion and the like, there was significant cognitive load in regards to making notes. You were worried 😩 about always having your notepad handy, there was an underlying concern about losing or damaging your notes, and you couldn’t make significant changes to previous notes.

Digital notetaking 📝 removes this entire bucket of cognitive friction by making your notes always accessible, stored on the cloud so there’s no concern about damage, and ofcourse, easily editable so you can update notes as you gain more knowledge.

Another great example of reducing cognitive friction is a baby monitor 👩‍🍼. It is a device which allows you to hear or monitor your baby, when you are not around him/her. A baby monitor can offer audio or video data of your infant. These devices can also track breathing, temperature, and heart rate of the infant to provide you a more thorough picture of your baby’s health.

This significantly reduces the cognitive load a parent 👩‍👦 would feel when away from their child, worried about how their baby is doing. Now, they get direct line of contact to keep track of their baby.

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Emotional Friction

Perhaps the deepest level of friction, emotional friction 🥶 refers to emotions your users feel that prevent them from accomplishing their goals. These are often the most difficult to understand and hence also the most difficult to address.

When we discussed the rise of BeReal, we noted that one of the reasons BeReal has exploded in popularity is because of the extremely low emotional bar to share a photo.

While you can have over 1,000 followers on Instagram, you’d probably only have 20 friends on BeReal, and you’d be happy with that. While some people might be hesitant to share themselves sleep-deprived 🥱 with thousands of vague acquaintances on Instagram, it’s much easier to share with your closest friends on BeReal.

Another example is the async video 🎥 communication platform, Loom. Loom’s goal is to make communicating at work simpler, reducing meetings where possible. But a lot of its users face camera shyness.

Rather than focus on what I had to share, I got distracted by the process of videotaping the message. How do I make eye contact? Is this awkward? Why don’t I like the way my face looks? 😩 Sometimes, I would end up recording Looms multiple times to get the right take. I didn't know how to not be awkward on camera. - Paulius Dragunas, Senior Engineering Manager at Loom

Loom combats this emotional friction by designing the app to focus not on the person recording the video (you are a small bubble on the corner of the screen), but rather maintaining focus on the task at hand.

And that’s it! Next time you design a flow, or revamp your product experience, keep in mind that you need to solve for more than just interaction friction 😁.

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And while you’re here, remember, there are only 3 rules to life:

1. Be kind to everyone you meet

2. Don’t take yourself too seriously

3. Drink lots of water

See you next week!

If you're looking to improve your own onboarding experience, and are looking for some inspiration, you've come to the right place.

The food delivery app: DoorDash

One of the biggest stages of friction, when you download a new mobile app, is the initial sign-up phase.

The process of signing up and the associated friction can’t be skipped, but can you transfer this friction to a later stage - to a point where you’ve already delivered some value to the user?

DoorDash’s onboarding shifts the friction associated with signing up closer to the end of the user journey, to get more new users to place their first order as quickly as possible.

DoorDash’s initial signup page has the regular email and Google signup options, but it also includes an option for continuing as a guest.

This is brilliant because DoorDash can let users explore its value - browse restaurants in their location and even add items to their cart - without signing up. Only when you need to place your order are you asked to fill in your address and other details.

If possible, you can also experiment with your onboarding flow to check if significant points of friction (such as signing up) can be backloaded to the later stage of the user journey, to a point after your users have seen value.

The mental fitness app: Calm

Calm is a meditation and relaxation app. If you ever use Calm, you’ll notice it starts delivering value immediately - right when the app is loading!

Calm’s onboarding has a few steps, including questions about my goals for joining (meditation, managing stress, sleeping better, etc). Due to this slightly longer onboarding, they have included some social proofing midway to motivate users to finish onboarding.

Very soon, I’m introduced to the home screen. An aesthetically pleasing design.

The background matches well with what the app promises to do: help us relax and dissolve all stress and anxiety.

But if you’ll notice, the first Daily Calm session is locked away, and only accessible to Premium users. It would be worth testing to show recommendations that users can actually spend time on, without having to commit to a Premium plan. The principle always being to deliver value before you ask for a commitment.

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2. Don’t take yourself too seriously

3. Drink lots of water

See you next week!

DropBox 📤 was perhaps the most well-known at the time, known for its ease of use and broad consumer appeal. Given this consumer focus, DropBox didn’t invest as heavily in enterprise features and standards demanded by IT departments in large companies.

Meanwhile, Microsoft SharePoint 📋 was the widely used file-sharing application in the enterprise. But despite the name recognition of Microsoft, SharePoint simply wasn’t as streamlined or intuitive as either Box or DropBox.

It was this gap in the enterprise segment that Box wanted to capitalise on. How could they win in this scenario? 🤔

It utilised a technique called Creating the Competition, as described by Geoffrey Moore in his book, Crossing the Chasm. You position your company using two competitors as beacons 💡so the market can easily locate your company’s unique value proposition.

Box used Sharepoint as a market alternative and DropBox as its product alternative.

The market alternative is a vendor your customer has been using for years, it solves the same use cases and takes up the same budget that you will go after. The product alternative is a competitor who has a similar tech offering as you do, but you can stand out from them by calling out a specific target market focus.

By calling out SharePoint as its market alternative, Box makes it clear that it solves the same problem, and the budget directed to SharePoint can now be allocated to Box because of its superior value proposition 🙌.

DropBox served as the product alternative, showcasing that Box too solved for radical ease of use in file-sharing, but Box could come out as superior for the needs of the IT departments by focusing on its heavy enterprise standards.

Box positioned itself as the best of both worlds: The ease of use of DropBox meets the enterprise security and controls of SharePoint.

Box still has to deliver on its promises, but it does not have to struggle to explain its value proposition to the enterprises.

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Every startup has only four scalable customer acquisition channels available to them, namely - paid ads, SEO, virality and sales. These are the only channels with a high ceiling that also allow for compounding results 📈.

Other channels have low ceilings, easily saturate and don’t yield compounding results. Email marketing depends on your email list (which also can get saturated quickly if you keep blasting emails), going viral on social media is hard to replicate, PR only leads to spikes in traffic and doesn’t compound, etc.

Now, consider the fact that not all four will actually work for you. The channel that you can use to grow is uniquely dependent on your product and your monetization model.

This is the reason most startups fail 📉 at getting good distribution.

“Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work: poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.” - Peter Thiel, Zero to One.

Let’s consider different channels and see why they might work for your startup:

1. Virality 🦠: Needs very low time-to-value, free to very low ticket-sizes and the product’s value prop should be applicable to a high % of the user’s network

2. User-generated content 👩‍👩‍👦‍👦: Product usage should allow users to generate content, which they should be motivated enough to share themselves, or the product itself should distribute it via SEO

3. Paid marketing 📣: Needs low time-to-value, low to medium ticket-size and upfront payments to fund next cycle of paid marketing

4. Sales 🤝: Best works for high ticket-size B2B SaaS companies with long negotiation cycles before closure

All fast-growing companies have achieved major scale through one of these 4 scalable channels which was uniquely suited to their circumstances:

1. Whatsapp scaled via organic invites (virality) - free product coupled with an inherent need for a user to invite their friends to chat 💬 with them

2. Dropbox 📤 scaled through a well-executed referral program (virality) - free product, users come to get storage and are incentivised with more storage if they invite their friends

3. Quora scaled with user generated content distributed via SEO - users come to Quora, write answers 🙋‍♀️ to questions from other users, and Quora distributes these answers through SEO, which enables more users on google to find them

4. Booking.com scaled with performance marketing 📣 - High search volume for keywords like “hotels in Paris”, multiplied hundreds of times for all the different cities and locations, enabled them to take advantage of Google Adwords. Tools like Supabot help companies create beautiful ads in minutes, without hiring expensive agencies. Ad creation is only going to get easier.

5. Veeva grew almost exclusively via sales - they sell $1M+ ARR 🤑 contracts to life sciences companies which need very long negotiation cycles, and this high ticket-size easily supports an enterprise sales team

Which distribution channel will you use to grow? Let us know in the comments.

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Why are some products like Evernote so hard to leave, while others like Tinder are uninstalled all the time? 🤔

Sarah Tavel’s Hierarchy of Engagement explains the mechanics behind creating sticky consumer products.

You must satisfy two criteria to build a sticky consumer product:

1. The product experience should get better as the user engages more with it (accruing benefits)

2. Continuous engagement should also make it harder for the user to leave (mounting losses)

The first condition is quite prevalent now. In a nutshell, it’s about using data to personalise and improve the user’s experience 📲.

Consider LinkedIn. You use it to build a following or connect with relevant people in your network. The more requests you send out, the more personalised content you see, status updates you get, etc. Your experience gets better the more you use it (accruing benefits).

What’s more interesting is the 2nd point, on mounting losses. We can again look at LinkedIn. To move away from LinkedIn would mean losing your network, which, if you’re serious about your professional network, you’ve probably built by investing lots of time and effort.

Many products fail at building mounting losses. For example, food delivery 🍔 apps like DoorDash in the US or Zomato/Swiggy in India have little to no barriers to leaving. With every order you make, the app inherently doesn’t make it harder for you to leave their platform. However, their recent efforts towards building subscription models are a way these apps are looking to lock in users for longer.

Products like Notion and Evernote succeed on both fronts. The more I store in Notion, the more value I am likely to get when I want to reference past material (accruing benefits). On the other hand, Notion now operates as a second brain 🧠 for a number of people, and they can’t imagine life without it. They’d lose all that information if they had to leave (mounting losses).

To build an engaged user base that retains on your product for longer, not only do you need to build accruing benefits, but you also need to create mounting losses. 😄

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This one stat blows our mind. 34% of startups fail due to never finding product-market fit. 🤯

Well, in hindsight, given how difficult it is to achieve PMF, is it so surprising?

If you could somehow test your hypothesis quickly, without spending months on development, that would be pretty neat.

Today, we look at two companies that used out-of-the-box solutions to validate their market and product.

A company which validated demand with strong excitement 🤩

Dropbox validated its product with a simple explainer video. Back in 2007, founder Drew Houston was working on building a prototype, but he knew it wasn’t ready for a public launch yet. He still wanted to gauge whether the file sync problem would be felt by others as well.

So he recorded a video of his prototype, demonstrating its main features and use cases. He released his Dropbox explainer video MVP to Hacker News. At the bottom of the video was a form to join the waiting list for the private beta.

The Dropbox explainer video MVP showed how you could instantaneously make a change on one computer and see it reflected live online. They grew their beta waiting list from 5,000 to 75,000 overnight 🤯.

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A company which validated demand with strong willingness to pay

Buffer - a product that helps you post to Twitter more consistently - validated demand for their idea with a simple 2-page MVP test as below.

They saw people clicking through and giving their emails, so they knew that people would probably want what they were building. But they also wanted to know whether people would shell money out of their pocket for this product.

So how did they check willingness to pay? This was as simple as adding another page in between with free and paid plan options, even though these plans were not operational yet (there was no product yet either 🥶).

When they saw people still submitting emails and that too after clicking on the paid plans 💰, that was enough conviction for them to start building the product.

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Think SEO is outdated? Maybe if you’re doing it like everybody else.

Product Hunt, a website that curates the best new products, has established itself as the go-to place for:

1. Tech enthusiasts eagerly looking to discover new products

2. The makers of these products to gain traction and validation from the market

On the way, it’s managed to build one of the most authoritative websites having a domain rating of 90 with over 100M backlinks. How exactly did it manage to do this?

It’s common knowledge today how Typeform managed to build over 100M backlinks. You embed a Typeform on your website, and that form has a code snippet which links directly to Typeform’s website, effectively working as a backlink.

What many don’t know is that Product Hunt used broadly this same tactic, albeit in a novel way more suited to their product. 🤓

The secret to their success? Badges. Yup. These little things.

Product Hunt gives out badges for many categories - Product of the Day, Product of the Week, etc.

These badges serve three purposes:

1. For the badge receiver, it’s social proof that their product was found to be one of the best by the tech community

2. Increase Product Hunt’s visibility to everyone landing on the page

3. Perhaps most importantly, serve as direct backlinks to Product Hunt’s website, increasing their domain authority

Over time, Product Hunt accumulated millions of backlinks across thousands of domains that now proudly show off these badges 🥇.

To double down on this strategy, they now let websites even add a “featured on Product Hunt” badge, further increasing their visibility and website authority.

Anyone with a post on Product Hunt can add this badge to their website, even if they haven’t been featured on the homepage.

Quick takeaway: The best tech companies are able to use already established channels like SEO in new ways that align with their product to leapfrog past their competitors. 🚀

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Miro gets over 2M monthly organic search traffic to their website. It also counts almost all of the Fortune 100 as its customers. It’s a brilliant case study on how to capture demand for all the different use cases your product caters to 🤓.

Miro is an online whiteboarding software, but a lot of its target audience doesn't even know what whiteboarding is. What the audience does know is their use case (I want to create a product roadmap, or I want to create a mind map), which they google for a solution.

Miro captures this opportunity by creating templates (product roadmap template, mind map template, etc), which are distributed as search engine-optimized landing pages. If you search “product roadmap template” on google, the second organic result after all the ads is Miro’s template page.

To double down on capturing demand from all these use cases, Miro’s team has created 300+ templates 📕 across Product, Design, Research and Strategy use cases.

Miro has also templatized the structure of these landing pages. Each landing page has similar sections such as an about section, things to consider, FAQs, etc.

This serves 3 purposes:

1. Makes it easy for the Miro team to replicate this design across hundreds of landing pages

2. Provides search engines with keyword-rich content

3. Provides users with context on how to get started using these templates (no matter how keyword-rich your content is, Google is smart enough to not promote it if it doesn't help users 😎)

The Miroverse 👩‍👩‍👦‍👦 takes this one step further. Now, the Miro user base can generate their own templates and open them up to the broader community. In April’22, the community added 1,000 new templates to the Miroverse.

Again, Miro distributes these new templates via SEO. The Miroverse is a great example of user-generated, company-distributed (via SEO) content. According to Ahrefs, they rank over 8,000 such keywords in the Top 10 positions on google 🤯.

Miro’s phenomenal growth led to a $400M Series C at a $17.5B valuation. With the rise of remote work, looks like they still have lots of room to grow 🚀.

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That’s it for this Spotlight. Thanks for joining us!

And while you’re here, remember, there are only 3 rules to life:

1. Be kind to everyone you meet

2. Don’t take yourself too seriously

3. Drink lots of water

See you next week!

If there’s one thing all product folks agree on, it’s that users should experience as frictionless an experience as possible - whether on your website, going through your app for the first time, while giving you their information, etc.

How do you take this concept one step further 🧐? Let people start using your product without creating an account. Then, get them to create an account as a natural extension of their actions.

Let’s take a look at Carrd, the one-page website builder, that has made getting started so simple, that it should be illegal.

When you land on Carrd’s website, they nudge you to “Choose a Starting Point” (i.e. a website template). You start exploring templates and customizing them for your own use case. Here’s something we made in a couple of minutes.

It’s so easy to do, that you can finish building your own site before you’ve ever signed up for an account. It only asks you to sign up when you try to publish your site. At that point, you’ve already:

1. Invested time and effort into Carrd;

2. Experienced firsthand how easily Carrd lets you create a website

You’ve come this far, it only makes sense to sign up for an account now. 😄

Subscribe now

That’s it for this Spotlight. Thanks for joining us!

And while you’re here, remember, there are only 3 rules to life:

1. Be kind to everyone you meet

2. Don’t take yourself too seriously

3. Drink lots of water

See you next week!